From your excellent greenspan post.
If men did not have some commodity of objective value which was generally acceptable as money, they would have to resort to primitive barter or be forced to live on self-sufficient farms and forgo the inestimable advantages of specialization. If men had no means to store value, i.e., to save, neither long-range planning nor exchange would be possible.
I am accepting his meme to this point. I need air, food and drink for 80 years on average, I value and need those and need a way to store that value. Air seems to still be free, but I must pay for food and drink. Perhaps one day in the future good air will have to be bought too, so I need a store of value to buy it since I don't have a device to store all I need for my life. Just like I can't store all the drink and food I need, but you can go to longlifefoods.com and get an MRE for about 6 bucks a package.
medium of exchange must be a durable commodity, usually a metal.
Why? Why cant the medium of exchange be an electronic coin issued by a world bank that we all turn our trust over too that it can't be counterfieted. A coin that can sit in my checkcard or be sent over the internet - a virtual coin for a virtual world.
dictionary.reference.com
Well a commodity should be something that can be turned to commercial advantage or an ag or mining product that can be processed and resold, I don't wear gold jewelry, my niece doesn't either - gold fails in this regard no? It is not REALLY a commodity in that regard to me and my family,. Palladium or platinum would be because they are heavily used in cars to clean if we drive cars - so I could see thier use - but where is gold heavily used in some industry and thier is no cheap substitute here or on the way in the future? Pearly button said if you wanted 300 year cd's you needed gold reflective layers, I don't need 300 year cd's, 10 year cd's seem to work fine for my limited archiving.
A metal is generally chosen because it is homogeneous and divisible: every unit is the same as every other and it can be blended or formed in any quantity.
The digital coin can be put into my virtual wallet - and if I want to split it into 2 digital coins half the value I can do that - why worry with all that metal?
Precious jewels, for example, are neither homogeneous nor divisible. More important, the commodity chosen as a medium must be a luxury. Human desires for luxuries are unlimited and, therefore, luxury goods are always in demand and will always be acceptable.
Gold is not a luxury to me, I don't wear it, I don't eat it, I guess you could use it in my house to collect dust. So it would have a small cleaning use - hehe. So the commodity must be a luxury - well everything is so ubiquitous in my house - not very many luxuries. I would miss my air first if that was taken away, then my water, then my food, I would miss my house, and miss my energy to power my devices, I would miss my connectivity to the matrix if that got taken away.
Wheat is a luxury in underfed civilizations, but not in a prosperous society.
Right, wheat would not be a good trade item in the USA - or anything else where demand for it by everyday people was far greater than supply - well what around you Elroy do you need to use a lot of everyday and there is not enough supply? I hear oil may be like that, but not much else, what do you really want you can't get - michelle pfeiffers company for the evening is about all I really want badly and can't get - that is a luxury - everything else I can get in this prosperous society. And I can find a cheap substitute to do what pfieffer would do - hehe.
Cigarettes ordinarily would not serve as money, but they did in post-World War II Europe where they were considered a luxury. The term "luxury good" implies scarcity and high unit value. Having a high unit value, such a good is easily portable; for instance, an ounce of gold is worth a half-ton of pig iron.
Easily portable is important, I want to go buy my 4th investment house, and a new ferrari - how many gold coins would I have to lug around? Thank goodness for plastic cards and banks with wire transfers. What need do we have in aggregate that technology and future progress can't help to satisfy? I watched on the history channel that columbus and some of the other "discoverers" did not NEED gold, they had BLOOD LUST, they liked killing people - much easier to kill people over here where no one cared about than kill them back in thier home countries where powerful nation states with police forces might arrest them - Jay Chen has a need to kill people - he fires up deathmatch and blows them up.
In the early stages of a developing money economy, several media of exchange might be used, since a wide variety of commodities would fulfill the foregoing conditions. However, one of the commodities will gradually displace all others,
As credit cards and check cards have replaced green paper and shiny metal right?
by being more widely acceptable. Preferences on what to hold as a store of value, will shift to the most widely acceptable commodity, which, in turn, will make it still more acceptable. The shift is progressive until that commodity becomes the sole medium of exchange. The use of a single medium is highly advantageous for the same reasons that a money economy is superior to a barter economy: it makes exchanges possible on an incalculably wider scale.
Visa and mastercard are taken at a lot of places. I know at mcdonalds they will NOT take a gold coin or a 100 dollar US bill - even though it is legal tender under the law - but they will take my credit or check card. I guess it is lots easier for corporate to TRADE hamburgers for virtual money and do daily tally's of thier profit and loss when a computer can count the digital 1 and zeroes instantly instead of having to wait for the millions of pimply faced teenagers to count the gold coins or green papers.
Whether the single medium is gold, silver, seashells, cattle, or tobacco is optional, depending on the context and development of a given economy. In fact, all have been employed, at various times, as media of exchange. Even in the present century, two major commodities, gold and silver, have been used as international media of exchange, with gold becoming the predominant one. Gold, having both artistic and functional uses and being relatively scarce,
Bill gates has digital walls in his house to show a digital copy of the mona lisa - he does not have gold art from what I have read, I have a montior that I pull up many copies of images on - I don't need REAL art (what is that anyways - hehe) - the virtual stuff works for me and many other geeks. So what are these "artistic" and "functional" uses that Greenie talks about - to me, to bill gates, to warren buffet, to other geeks in the matrix?
has significant advantages over all other media of exchange.
Strip it of its functional and artistic uses - then tell me why mcdonalds takes credit and check cards but does not take gold coins or 100 dollar green paper?
Since the beginning of World War I, it has been virtually the sole international standard of exchange. If all goods and services were to be paid for in gold, large payments would be difficult to execute and this would tend to limit the extent of a society's divisions of labor and specialization.
Right, if mcdonalds only took gold coins, it would be so hard to run a global megacorp having to tally gold ounces by millios of people everyday - mcdonalds is 24/7 in my city now - imagine all the mcdonalds all over the world constantly having PEOPLE have to count the gold or currency notes and keep entering that into a database somewhere - much easier to swipe your credit card and let the computer do all that accounting work. But Puplava knows that is not the future, the future is gold coins, why isn't he running mcdonalds then and the dummies who went to credit/check card payments at mcdonalds are running it?
Thus a logical extension of the creation of a medium of exchange is the development of a banking system and credit instruments (bank notes and deposits) which act as a substitute for, but are convertible into, gold.
Gold has no use to me as ART and I can't eat it so I don't see any other functional use for it either, I could much more easily see a world bank with digital coins backed by PHYSICAL oil than I can PHYSICAL gold.
It is scarce, but so is moondust - should we back the digital coins on moondust - gold and moondust have the same use to me. |
